Industrial Design

Snapshot
Snapshot
Andrew
Wright
CLASS OF 1994
Exposed
Alumnus
Andrew Wright’s
photography
draws global
acclaim
U of T Mississauga is like an object in the
distance in a piece of Andrew Wright’s photographic
art; although it isn’t the focus of the
work, it continues to make its presence felt.
Wright, an artist and chair of the visual
arts program at the University of Ottawa,
has exhibited with the likes of Michael
Snow and Edward Burtynsky, and his works
hang in the Canadian High Commission
in London, U.K. and aboard the Canadian
warship HMCS Toronto.
Wright arrived at UTM in 1990 from
Kingston, Ont. He earned a specialist BA
in art and art history in 1994, shuttling
back and forth between UTM and Sheridan
College for classes in the joint program. “It
was pretty idyllic,” he says of UTM. “We used
to wake up with deer on our lawn. It felt like
we were just on the edge of farmers’ fields.”
Wright went on to earn his MFA at the
University of Windsor, but returned to UTM
and Sheridan briefly to teach in the program
from which he had graduated. “I wasn’t sure
how one makes a living as an artist and how
to sustain a practice,” Wright says. “I started
picking up teaching jobs here and there and
did sessional teaching for about a decade.
“It was just happenstance that I ended up
teaching [at UTM]. I may be the only graduate
who has taught in the program, and it’s a
personal point of pride.”
Wright was required to teach a photography
course and it was then that he first
began to consider the possibilities offered
by photography as a medium. His early
practice had focused on sculpture.
“I came to photography through the back
door,” Wright says. “I didn’t do it with any
seriousness until I left graduate school.
“When I came back to teach at Sheridan,
I was given a photography class, and I had to
learn pretty quickly.” Today, photographic art
is his focus, although his work is “not about
making pretty pictures. “The photo graphy I
do is about something other than the image
presented,” Wright says. “I comment on the
circumstances around their creation or
assumptions we make about esthetic value;
I try to challenge assumptions.”
One of his ongoing passions is the
camera obscura, a technique that is the
ancestor to today’s camera. The term—
which literally means dark chamber—
involves a darkened room where light is
admitted through a pinhole that casts the
outside image on a dark wall in inverted
fashion. Mirrors and lenses are often used
to redirect the image.
Wright recently took his art to the
Korean port of Ulsan, the world’s largest
shipping port. Using a shipping container
as a camera obscura, he created images of a
tree hanging upside down from a crane.
“The work is a bit of commentary on the
commercial-industrial nature of the practice
of photography,” he says. “The tree is upside
down, so it’s right side up in the camera.
It’s a contemplation on the nature of photography
in a very industrial context.”
As a practising artist, Wright has dozens
of exhibitions under his belt, including
four solo shows in the past two years and
publication of a large catalogue of his work.
The exhibitions coincided with the first
sabbatical of his career, a year that saw him
work on projects in locations as far flung as
Venice and the Yukon.
Although he has taught at the
University of Ottawa since 2008, Wright
hasn’t forgotten his UTM roots. He personally
raises money each year for an alumni
award given to a graduate of the art and art
history program. “It’s about recognizing
the program and trying to contribute back
to everything the program gave me: a sense
of possibility, a sense of opportunity and
a really good grounding in creative and
critical thinking.” — Elaine Smith
DISUSED TWIN BROWNIE HAWKEYE CAMERAS;
SELF-PORTRAIT; SUSPENDED/BOUND TREE
ALL PHOTOS COURTESY ANDREW WRIGHT
9 M MAGAZINE
FALL 2016
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